


As Hounds to Hunt

by Confabulatrix



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Eventual Romance, F/M, Sentient Jaegers, close canon-ish, defictionalized media, science and magic working together, slur warning: g. danger's name, wild hunt AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-07-04
Updated: 2014-07-04
Packaged: 2018-02-07 09:21:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 850
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1893735
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Confabulatrix/pseuds/Confabulatrix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Humanity was good at adapting to extraordinary adversity, so when the kaiju came, they thought themselves equal to the threat at hand. They had survived the Wild Hunt for millennia well enough. How much worse could the kaiju be?</p><p>They learned better.</p><p> </p><p>  <i>To fight the monsters of another world, we employed the monsters of our own.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	As Hounds to Hunt

_And see ye these, the howl and spell-hound of the furious army,  
And know then thy freedom as a fleet-foot'd dream, fond and lost to thee._

—Sir Alleyn Sevior, Factor of Mersea  
Act I, Scene IV, _The Hell-Hunt, or The Wilde Army and the Old North  
_ Christopher Marlowe, 1596

 

Prologue: The First Hound

 

Anyone who said the Jaegers couldn't love had forgotten the Anchorage Incident. When the kaiju Knifehead killed Yancy Becket, his younger brother finished the fight and held the handshake with an injured Jaeger for another seven hours _alone._ Raleigh was still conscious when the rescue choppers found him, burning from her wounds and grief-mad for the brother who'd been torn out of him in battle, but silent. He cried out only when the medics finished the separation binding, an awful ugly sound he must have choked back for hours. They ministered chemical oblivion as a mercy and watched him and each other with wary relief. Raleigh had stayed well clear of the Margin, per standard operating procedure, but he'd been out alone so long there honestly shouldn't still have been anything of him left in his body.

They discovered later that for all he had struggled so stubbornly to hold her, never once did Gipsy Danger call the Hunt to bring her home. Such a thing couldn't be imagined. If it wasn't love, well. What else, in any world, could compel a full born-and-blooded Jaeger of the Wild Hunt?

 

The Wild Hunt had ridden over sea and land so long as human history had the capacity to record it. The Hunt respected neither boundaries nor nations; if human souls were there to pursue, at some point or another the hounds and hunters would give chase.

They loved storms and battlefields, and though the last one they'd ridden to had been Sunchon there was always the itching paranoia it would happen again. Human conflicts tended to avoid anything but small, usually ineffective tactical strikes anymore, because larger engagements and open lines were practically an invitation, even in spite of the Fourth Accord.

The defensive sorcery sector was a lucrative business, and conspiracy theorists liked to whisper that the declassified Accords were a secret front to cover regular human sacrifice.

Most people went on with their lives as they would if the Hunt didn't exist. Insurance companies treated it like any other natural disaster, every major city had Margin Walls, and those that didn't often had tax subsidies to build shelters and cover spell-locks for rural citizens.

Humanity was good at adapting to extraordinary adversity, so when the kaiju came, they thought themselves equal to the threat at hand.

They learned better.

 

The kaiju Karloff made landfall at 1:02 am local in Vancouver on April 23rd, 2015, nine hours after emerging from the Breach. Oceanic tracking followed it most of the way, and evacuation orders were sent forward as early as possible, but it was impossible to evacuate the whole Pacific Northwest, so fully half the population was still in the city when Karloff came in through Burrard Inlet and stomped its way east on Hastings.

Official reports varied on what happened next; there were no cameras in the area and the reconstructed timelines varied on when the Vancouver Margin fell, but witnesses on the scene reported seeing the First walking up Hastings, senseless of the dust and destruction all around him. They agreed he raised an arm to point at the kaiju, though no consensus was made on whether it was his right arm or his left.

Everyone within a twenty mile radius heard the howl.

Later, cellphones and surveillance cameras pieced together a more complete picture, but the iconic footage was taken from a news chopper two kilometers away.

The kaiju were interphasic nightmares, capable of tearing down a bridge in one second and ghosting through the wreckage in the next. Conventional weapons didn't work, and magic slid over them as if they weren't there. Before, nothing short of a direct nuclear blast could touch them.

Millions saw the spectral rider rise up to an even height with Karloff, light pollution gleaming off its bone helm, and watched in terrified exultation as it swung out with armored fists and beat the kaiju to death.

Her name, she told them after, through the lips and lungs of the First, was Brawler Yukon.

 

Later still, a funeral would be held for Lieutenant Adam Casey, whose body became the First during a disastrous attempt by the Factors Caitlin Lightcap and Jasper Schoenfeld to contact the Huntmaster. They had been given permission and assigned to negotiate a Fifth Accord. They didn't reach the _Meister_ , but they did capture a rider, a true _Jaeger_ , and accident found her bound to Casey's body.

"He felt no pain," she told the press.

Lightcap and Schoenfeld knew otherwise. History would know Adam Casey as the First, but they had been there that day in Pittsburgh when Brawler Yukon looked out at them from a human face still creased with pain, spoke with a voice still raw from screaming, and called him her First Hound.

**Author's Note:**

> This is an ongoing project and an exercise in stretching my writing legs. Stick with me, there's more to come!


End file.
